The exemplary embodiments relate generally to weighing apparatus and more specifically to weighing apparatus for assisting in the management of inventory and related processes.
Many types of weighing apparatus are known in the art. One type of weighing apparatus may generally be used in the retail environment. Typically, these types of weighing apparatus may be placed in retail establishments such as, but not limited to, grocery stores, department stores and general merchandise stores. These weighing apparatus may be placed in many different locations throughout these stores. For example, the weighing apparatus may be placed in the deli, bakery, meat department, produce department, and/or mini stores. Mini stores may be smaller retail establishments within a larger retail establishment. Examples of mini stores include restaurants, coffee shops, etc.
These locations may have many items that may be subject to spoilage. The items may generally be food items, but are not limited to food items. The food items may be items available for purchase by customers or ingredients to be used with other food items to create another food item which may be sold to customers. The locations associate these items with dates and/or times. The dates/times may show when an item must be sold by, used by or moved on to a next step in a process. Currently, these dates/times are created and monitored manually. When an item is created, an employee may mark a card or print a label with the appropriate date/time. Once the date/time is reached, the item may be thrown away or moved to the next step in the process along with a new card or label displaying the next appropriate date/time information.
This process may be burdensome, difficult to maintain and support and subject to may errors. First, each item must have a separate label or card. Not only is this a time consuming process, but it is also subject to many errors due to the manual entry of the date/time onto each card or label. Second, each card or label must be monitored manually. If a date/time expires and no employees have noticed, then the items may either be sold to a customer or expire before being used in the next step of a process, thus leading to wasted products. Third, individual ingredients may not be tracked for each process step. The exemplary embodiments attempt to solve or mitigate these problems by providing a weighing apparatus having a plurality of user interfaces, one of which may be a process control interface. The process control interface may include a plurality of process steps which may provide process data to a print interface for printing a label with the process data.